SystemLink has a video from a German gamer (thanks Joao) showing what's alleged to be spyware activity from Origin, EA's online service. This uses a process monitor to attempt to show what sort of data from your system is being reported back to Electronic Arts. Eurogamer has EA's response to this, which denies any wrongdoing:

EA Germany has now updated Origin's terms of service in response to the furore and issued a statement denying its software was spyware.

"We have updated the End User License Agreement of Origin, in the interests of our players to create more clarity," EA Germany announced in a statement yesterday. "Origin is not spyware. Neither do we use nor install spyware on the PCs of users.

"We do not have access to information such as pictures, documents or personal data, which have nothing to do with the execution of the Origin program on the system of the player, neither will they be collected by us.

"EA takes the privacy of its users very seriously. We have taken every precaution to protect the personal and anonymous user data collected."

Post CommentEnter the details of the comment
you'd like to post in the boxes below and click the button at
the bottom of the form.

Beamer wrote on Nov 2, 2011, 07:39:It isn't monitoring, it's looking at directories. From what I understand it is not opening anything.

Still not right, but it's basically doing what 90% of Google's programs do. Remember Google Desktop? Does Google even still make that? Now that was a program that looked at everything you did in detail...

Well considering Google Desktop was a search program it sort of has to touch all files on your computer to, well, search.

Origin has no fucking business touching anything outside its own directory and system files.

Like I said, still wrong. But you know what Google was doing with everything it searched, right?